I just ran another experiment. This time I monitored the traffic to the POD IP.
As soon as I perform the curl I see several packets that flow to port 8080 (“webcache”). Its not until 1 minute later that I see the SYN packet that triggers the request sent to the pod itself… then the pod responds.
Its interesting to see that the SYN packets that lead up to the successful request have increasing time delays (in seconds): 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32… Then we see the SYN ACK